TEDx Hackney at the Arcola – review
Inua Ellams at TEDx Hackneyat the Arcola. Photograph: TEDx Hackney
Most young, tech-inclined twenty-somethings (which is to say, most twenty-somethings) are well familiar with the experience of watching grainy 18 minute TED Talks on their computer screen.
But Saturday’s TedxHackney event, held at the Arcola Theatre, was a different experience entirely.
With audience members’ brains forced to jump from urban planning, Taoism, and North Korea in the morning session and to modern dance, sexual attraction, and children’s mental health in the afternoon, the event almost dares attendees not to feel inspired or think about things in a new way once they leave.
TEDx is an initiative of the TED Conference, a Long Beach, California-based non profit devoted to “ideas worth spreading.”
Saturday’s event was independently organised (signified by the ‘x’ in the moniker) but stayed true to the format of TED: presenting short, punchy talks centred around any big idea related to technology, entertainment, or design and free from any product, company or business promotion.
Highlights were Inua Ellams, a spoken word poet and performer who created his idea of a ‘Midnight Run’ on an aimless night he spent in London.
He now puts on the event in cities all over the world, creating “mobile communities for one night only” where participants come together to interact with the city space and each other.
Drawing on his background from being born in Nigeria and moving to the UK when he was ten, his central idea is for participants to “explore their city as a child might explore a maze” and that in order to combat the high rates of urban loneliness and suicide rates, “we have to live in our cities, not just work in them.”
The event was finished off by speaker Ian Wharton, a digital designer and creative director of award winning technology company Zolmo.
Starting his design career at 16 and having worked on mobile apps with over 8 million downloads, Wharton emphasised the power of creative intuition that has brought him his own success.
Offering proof of this, Wharton showed his short film Solar – which he considers to be the most important piece of work he’s created—and explained how everyone he sought advice from before making it told him the project would fail.
With pithy pieces of advice, Wharton’s talk emboldened listeners to challenge the corporate and conventional constraints that stifle creative careers and to embrace the fact that “new ideas are always ridiculous.”
More than just a series of talks, the TED brand has become the space of the internet age where engaged people come together to talk about ways to move the world forward—whether it’s between audience and speaker, in the comments thread of an online video, or in an informal lunch hour where attendees mingle with speakers.
Saturday’s event, emceed by social choreographer Daniel Vais and produced by Fiona Buckland, was no different and felt right at home in the vibrant setting that is Dalston.